If youâ€™re in Missouri, it might be better to take that old Ron Paul or Bob Barr bumper sticker off your car. A February 20 report to help Missouri law enforcement identify domestic terrorists has some alarming advice.

The report is put out by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, which is a â€œpublic safety partnership consisting of local, state and federal agencies.â€ It collects information on matters of homeland security and disseminates it throughout Missouri and neighboring states.

Supposedly, this is a report not meant for public distribution, but it is getting wide dissemination throughout the media. Although not one of my favorite sites because of exaggerated conspiracy theories, infowars.com has copies of the report.

In an attempt to identify where militia members may gather, the report identifies sources of political and anti-government rhetoric that it claims are suspect.

â€œMilitia members most commonly associate with 3rd party political groups. It is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitutional Party, Campaign for Liberty, or Libertarian material. These members are usually supporters of former Presidential Candidate: Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr.â€

Ralph Nader must be jealous not to be included as a subversive.
However, if you think being liberal might get you off easy, there are still ways to catch the liberal terrorists in our midst.

â€œMilitia members commonly display picture, cartoons, bumper stickers that contain anti-government rhetoric. Most of this material will depict the FRS, IRS, FBI, ATF, CIA, UN, Law Enforcement and â€œThe New World Orderâ€ in a derogatory manner.â€

It looks like as long as you donâ€™t question the government, then you wonâ€™t be a suspect. That makes just about everyone a suspect.

Here, letâ€™s give the Missouri authorities a chance to explain themselves as they did in this AP story:

Lt. John Hotz of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said the report comes from publicly available, trend data on militias. It was compiled by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a â€œfusion centerâ€ in Jefferson City that combines resources from the federal Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. The center, which opened in 2005, was set up to collect local intelligence to better combat terrorism and other criminal activity, he said.

â€œAll this is an educational thing,â€ Hotz said of the report. â€œTroopers have been shot by members of groups, so itâ€™s our job to let law enforcement officers know what the trends are in the modern militia movement.â€

Ron Paul bumper stickers. Anti-CIA rhetoric. That puts you on the path to be watched by Missouri law enforcement because you might be out to shoot them.

The report has some very weak arguments. It lists one of the motivators for the rise of militias the idiotic theory from Russian Professor Igor Panarin that the U.S. is going to split into six different nations as early as this year. According to this delusion, the Western U.S. may become part of China and the east coast will become part of the European Union. I must assume the authors of this report must have been looking for filler to include this lunacy. When Panarin presented this idea in Moscow recently, even the Russians snickered.

The report has just enough viable information about extremist Christian groups, white supremacist organizations, militant abortionists and anti-immigrant backers to give credence that it offers the â€œeducationalâ€ value that officer Hotz said it is about. That is the problem. What is going to stop someone in law enforcement from believing all of it?

As much a threat the federal government can be to civil liberties, it increasingly looks like itâ€™s the state cops that are going to have to be watched. Missouri is not the first state to head in this direction. Recently, a program in Maryland put peace-activist nuns, among others, on its terror watch list. However, all was not lost. In the name of national security, this specially trained unit spent hours investigating a potential chicken theft.

When anti-government rhetoric becomes something law enforcement wants to watch, then we all have cause to worry.

Paul is at best a borderline loon. I say at best because a definite case can be made to lose the borderline part of that. What does it say about a person that they are willing to follow a loon? I’ve always wondered that about the most dedicated Paul followers.

I’ve always wondered about people like you Jim S., who respond with complacency and concede control to the federal government. Maybe you would like them to wipe your rear for you as well while they are taking care of you all of your life?

Ron Paul on the other hand argues the values our country was founded on, personal liberty and freedom. If you call him a loon you are calling those who created and defended this great country loons, which could be construed as an anti-American statement. Maybe we should add you to the list as well…

What I find funny is the complete lack of evidence to support the “Paul is a loon” claim. But I guess when you don’t have the intellectual capacity to form an actual rebuttal to his positions, you must resort to name-calling.

No Kab, you are the Ron Paul supporting loon here. There’s a lot of names for people like that (Ronulans, Paultards, etc)

Jim told the truth about Ron Paul and you react with typical conspiracy theorist drivel (copying what someone says and saying it back to them) and saying that anyone who doesn’t buy your conspiracy theory is a “sheeple”.

Oh how I envy the enlightened few who are knowledgeable of the vast conspiracies that have the rest of us fooled. xD

I challenge your assertion. What makes Paul a loon? Do you think HR 1207 now with 28 co-sponsors is loony?

While difficult to prove the negative I submit the federal reserve transparency act, Paul’s use of Peter Schiff as an economic adviser and his focus on the economy in the republican primary debates as proof that Paul’s views have more than a little merit. Now prove me wrong. Submit items for consideration from Paul (not his supporters) of “loony” beliefs.

I have heard a lot of people call Ron Paul a loon, but paid little attention to Paul and was not exposed to him very often during the last campaign. On the few occasions when I was exposed to him, he mostly made fairly sound defensible arguments.

Not ones I necessarily agreed with, but not what I’d call loony. I would certainly say he’s a bit of a borderline candidate touting oversimplified approaches in some cases, and that he therefore attracts disenchanted folks susceptible to that kind of populist appeal.

Maybe he does in fact support some crackpot ideas. But he has at least a few sound defensible ones, and I don’t think he deserves to be simply dismissed.

But the 2-party system strongly militates that he be dismissed. Neither of the two parties can sustain a successful effort if an iconoclastic figure emerges with the power to attract a disproportionate number of votes from one of the two major parties. This accounts for why, in general, the GOP seems more eager to marginalize Paul, just as the democrats had been eager to marginalize Ralph Nader in the past.

Nader helped so much with it that its hard to tell now how much of the push came from the party. But it’s always a difficult position to negotiate. During the course of a primary campaign, the major party and its mainstream products can co-opt a small handful of the most viable and popular views of a guy like Paul or Nader. And then this will usually force the candidate further to the fringe to maintain a distinct identity. Sadly, there really isn’t a viable 3rd way for an insurgent candidacy. You either accept the co-opting and move into the mainstream or you end up actively participating in your own marginalization.

[...] Glenn Church: If youâ€™re in Missouri, it might be better to take that old Ron Paul or Bob Barr bumper sticker off your car. A February 20 report to help Missouri law enforcement identify domestic terrorists has some alarming advice. [...]

2) His refusal to jettison the GOP last year and run as an independent candidate

I changed my voter affiliation to “Republican” last year, just so I could hold my nose and vote for him at some Saturday morning closed GOP caucus (I was “holding my nose” because of the GOP angle–certainly not because of Ron Paul). I had a “clean” record of living my life free of any political party affiliations, up to that point. And then Ron Paul, with all his backing and all that money gushing in, off and decides he’d rather be a pissant congressman from Texas!

I suspect Missouri law enforcement will find the same thing with the “Ron Paul terrorists”: They’ll make big plans, gather the money and resources together to pull it off… and then bail out at the last minute.

“Bob Barr terrorists?” They’ll talk a lot of guff about “high morals,” and then late some Thursday night try to sneak some young girl in the back door of a Kansas City Planned Parenthood clinic.

(1) Says that it was basically the Union’s fault for starting the Civil War, despite that the South seceded and fired first upon federal forces. Apparently Paul is a racist, since he believes that white people should be liberated from federal government, but blacks should not be liberated from being slaves.

(2) His gold standard ideas seem pretty looney. It seems to me that the money supply needs to constantly expand as the country’s economic output expands and its population expands. So how can you fix your money supply (that needs to expand) onto a a finite natural resource (gold)?

(3) He did blame the US for 9/11. His words during an exchange in the Republican primary were they struck us because “we were over there” (i.e. because the US was fighting as part of the UN in Operation Desert Storm in 1991).

(4) Paul fails to grasp that some 40% of America would probably suffer severely under his economic plans, since income and wealth distribution are highly unequal, so having some sort of flat tax would be an enormous punishment to about 40% of Americans, would gut the funding for their schools, their healthcare and we probably would not even have enough money to maintain our defense, roads or other basic government services.

(5) Paul is a hypocrite in that he espouses total libertarianism but would only actually do selective libertarianism. Specifically he finds the federal government to be tyrannical, but accepts state government telling people what to do in abortion and gay marriage issues as not tyranny. That is hypocrisy.

(6) Paul is also a hypocrite in that he has inserted tens of millions of dollars of pork barrel spending for things as trivial as “shrimp research” for his district in Texas. He then votes against the bill AFTER putting the pork in.

(7) Paul is a conspiracy theorist in so far as he peddles this idea that there is a North American Union conspiracy theory.

(8) Ron Paul has lent his name to a newsletter of conspiracy theorists and racists.

Having encountered a large number of Ron Paul supporters on the internet, an unknown quantity of them are really hardcore tinfoil hat wearers. One Ron Paul supporter I met said that the Illuminati was behind everything, and when he was banned from the politics site, said the site was owned by the government and part of the Illuminati.

Another RP supporter told me that the GOP Republican primary in Nevada (where Paul lost to Romney) was rigged. Apparently another conspiracy. I would love to hear someone explain how the GOP Nevada primary was rigged so that Paul would lose. lol

Thanks for taking the time to put these together. It is only after having someone put these lists together can we discuss in a reasonable manner.

#1 The Union refused to allow the southern states to succeed. Until that time, the United States of America were just that – individual state governments that had some shared purpose in handling federal items like national defense. It wasn’t until Lincoln and the Civil war that federal government assumed so many federal powers. With regards to your race comment, many southerners were not fighting for slavery but against federal control. I know not whether Paul is a racist, because it really is an internal belief, but arguing that the north/union forced the war isn’t = to racist. Remember that the difference between being a rebel and a patriot is only a matter of who wins.

#2 Gold standards exists to combat inflation. While a gold standard exists, the paper money has the promise of some amount of gold in return for that money. Nobel Prize winner in economics Robert Mundell on the use of gold backed money to fight inflation. Definitively not loony.

#3 Paul was quoting the 9/11 report that cites our presence in Saudi Arabia as a contributing factor to the attacks. Page 2 of section 2. You can find the report here. In case you donâ€™t click through here is a quote:

In August 1996, Bin Ladin had issued his own self-styled fatwa calling on Muslims to drive American soldiers out of Saudi Arabia. â€¦. he told the interviewer: â€œWe are certain that we shallâ€”with the grace of Allahâ€”prevail over the Americans.â€ He went on to warn that â€œIf the present injustice continues . . . , it will inevitably move the battle to American soil.â€

#4 Paul doesnâ€™t support a flat tax, he wants to abolish income tax completely. He also wants to reduce spending of the federal government to offset that tax. He argues that we need quite a bit less to maintain roads and a national defense especially if we stop doing it abroad. Here is a link that shows our disproportionate defense spending habits. The important thing to note here is that the US spends more than the next 9 countries on the listâ€¦ combined. I think many on this blog can agree on less spending.

#5 I can see how you view the difference between state rule and federal rule as hypocrisy. However Paul has maintained the rule of the constitution and its appeal to states governing themselves vice the federal government in every speech, writing or debate Iâ€™ve ever seen of him. From a libertarian view, only anarchy provides absolute freedom, except that it doesnâ€™t. In a society with no rule of law, we wouldnâ€™t be able to have freedom because we would be governed by the strongest regardless of societal rules. I would argue quite simply that Paul has never espoused â€œtotal libertarianismâ€ as you coined the phrase. He advocates more liberty than we have today and he uses the founding fathers and our constitution as his guide for that more consistently than most politicians.

#6 I donâ€™t defend earmarks, Paul putting them into bills, or his voting record. If you think earmarks or voting against bills laden with them is loony for a congressman, than I donâ€™t think you are paying attention.

#7 I remember that question in the debate season. He has pointed out that the NAFTA is a type of trade union and that he didnâ€™t want to see any expansion of that agreement or others like it. Opposition to NAFTA or next generation trade agreements, whether it includes currency or not, is also not loony.

#8 I agree with you that Paulâ€™s association to the newsletter is loony.

#9 I didnâ€™t find the picture, but did find plenty of discussion. I was surprised to see that he kept the money from Don Black, but then I wouldnâ€™t expect him to try to limit any groupâ€™s constitutional protected voice so perhaps it is a consistent viewpoint. Jury is out on this one for me.

â€œRacism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals.â€ ~ Ron Paul.

Iâ€™d never argue that the Paul campaign doesnâ€™t pull the disenfranchised in a higher percentage than normal campaigns. His viewpoints are extreme in comparison to what we get out of the mainstream candidates. I donâ€™t accept that we can label the person without the discussion.

Just FYI, it took me less than 5 minutes to “put that list together.” I just listed those items from memory. Didn’t need to use Google or anything. These are fairly large items about Ron Paul, and the fact that there are so many egregious problems for Ron Paul just says what kind of person he is.

It seems that you seem to want to defend Paul on some of the list. I really don’t think most of those items are defensible, so I don’t think there’s a point to debating with you on most of the items on the list. If I had compiled a similar list for Pol Pot, David Duke, Stalin or Kim Jong Il, it would be possible for a defender of any of those people to come along and try to spin or rationalize the problems raised in each point. Such a debate of defending the indefensible with spin is not worth my time. I’ll just let people make what they will on the indefensible points that you try to defend, and only engage you on issues where your defense has any credibility.

#1) OK so we agree that Ron Paul blames the Union for the Civil War. That’s looney. You didn’t take a position on how Ron Paul puts a priority on protecting whites from the ‘tyranny’ of federal government, and assigns a lesser priority to blacks actually being enslaved under the tyranny of slavery. So you don’t defend these seeming racist set of priorities.

#2) Your defense of returning to the gold standard is to list a Nobel-prize winner who supports the notion, yet you didn’t address my objection to going back to the gold standard (i.e. it’s pointless since the economy is always expanding, so the money supply must always expand, and the supply of gold will not expand). So that means that your rationale for supporting this theory is pure deference to intellectual credentials alone. By that logic, since we do not hear most Nobel Laureates saying we need to return to the gold standard, then it can be assumed that more of these intellectual giants oppose returning to the gold standard, and thus using your logic of deference to intellectual authority, we must reject the gold standard theory since more intellectual giants oppose it than endorse it.

#3) Paul was not “quoting” anyone when he said that we invited the 9/11 attacks upon ourselves. He was expressing his own beliefs.

#4) Your defense of Paul on this point only adds to my point. Not even having a flat tax means that the federal government has no revenue, meaning that the government will not have the money for basic government services (defense and transportation) as well as providing for vital programs that people’s lives depends on (health care and welfare). Maybe that’s not a problem to you if we can’t defend the country, or if tens of millions of people are sick and other millions die or commit crimes due to sheer poverty and starvation. We’ll have to disagree on that.

#5) OK, so you accept as acceptable, what I have called Paul’s “selective libertarianism” or “hypocritical libertarianism”, whereby someone in Washington DC telling you what to do is oppression, but someone telling you what to do in a state capital is freedom. You think this is consistent and acceptable. We’ll agree to disagree on that as well.

#6) You basically duck my point here and then make a foolish assumption here. Yes, nearly all of Congress engages in pork-barrel projects, but not all of them are saying that the role of the federal government needs to be returned to colonial times. You can’t argue that we need to bring the size of government back to before Alexander Hamilton’s days, while requesting tens of millions of federal dollars for “shrimp research.”

#7) You have ducked this point here as well. NAFTA is not mentioned in this point. Ron Paul believes in a conspiracy theory that would unite North America into one country. That is not NAFTA.

#8) OK, we agree on this point then.

#9) OK, so we’ll again agree to disagree on this point. You defend a meeting and a handshake with a high profile Neo-Nazi as just ‘getting to know your constituents.’ I, and I suspect most people, find it to be something potentially damning about the politician who engages in it.

People, be they liberals, conservatives, libertarians, or whomever can rationalize anything that they choose to. The fact that anything can be spun, does not mean that people will condone certain “looney” behavior, just because it has been spun into something that seems sane.

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didnâ€™t speak up because I wasnâ€™t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didnâ€™t speak up because I wasnâ€™t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Catholics, And I didnâ€™t speak up because I was a Protestant;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didnâ€™t speak up because I wasnâ€™t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

—Pastor Martin Niemoller

To all of those who have fallen for this and say…”Oh, go get those Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin supporters…they are just loons anyway..” Well, you will one day be next on the list. It is called divide and conquer. First do as the Nazis and Russians did..target certain groups, marginalize them, call them names, and then say “Well, they are the real problem..if we didn’t have those Ron Paul supporters, we would be okay. They are the REAL terrorists. Make sure and fall for it. Don’t associate with one of THEM–otherwise you will be next. Of course, YOU are not one of THEM anyway, so what do you care?

CT…You are so right. Everyone has the right to an opinion and we should all be willing fight to the end for each of us to retain that right even when we disagree, because sooner or later, that right will be taken from each of us if we don’t.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

NOTE TO COMMENTERS:

You must ALWAYS fill in the two word CAPTCHA below to submit a comment. And if this is your first time commenting on Donklephant, it will be held in a moderation queue for approval. Please don't resubmit the same comment a couple times. We'll get around to moderating it soon enough.

Also, sometimes even if you've commented before, it may still get placed in a moderation queue and/or sent to the spam folder. If it's just in moderation queue, it'll be published, but it may be deleted if it lands in the spam folder. My apologies if this happens but there are some keywords that push it into the spam folder.

One last note, we will not tolerate comments that disparage people based on age, sex, handicap, race, color, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry. We reserve the right to delete these comments and ban the people who make them from ever commenting here again.

Thanks for understanding and have a pleasurable commenting experience.